The European Foreign Policy group looks at both EU as well as state foreign policies within Europe and their interconnections. The EU has faced external challenges that can be described as crises in recent years – the Arab Spring starting 2011, the challenge of Russia to its neighbours culminating in the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and the migration/refugee crisis starting in 2015.

All of these have challenged EU core norms, interests and approaches as well as a significant number of EU member states’ interests and policies in varying ways. They also showed that the EU’s external crises and their management are in various ways connected to domestic dynamics and policy challenges in ways that are not well conceptualised in foreign policy analysis generally and the study of EU foreign policy more specifically.

Examples of theoretically under-researched challenges at the intersection of the EU and national levels are populist movements, economic and legitimacy crises associated with the Eurozone, and functionalist linkages between Schengen, border protection and addressing push-factors of migration and refugee flows. The working group and its members are able to contribute to the common theme by:

1. Questioning from a theoretical and conceptual perspective some of the prevailing assumptions and priorities in foreign policy analysis as a sub-field of International Relations and contributing to a holistic/integrated approach to middle-range theorising of foreign policy-making in Europe. We value in particular the role of area studies expertise in making sense of the crises in the European neighbourhood, but also insights from public policy and political communication about advocacy, lobbying and framing.
 
2. Contributing to a better understanding about how and when crises are perceived as such by relevant policy-makers, combining both cognitive/ideational perspectives with material/objective accounts related to the power of focusing events and their consequences on the ground. This should also help to develop a more nuanced approach to crises as a concept and how it relates to other ways in which change occurs in foreign policy-making.
 
3. Contributing to debates about how the EU and individual European countries can become better at preventing crises before they mature, managing them better as they escalate, improving their efforts of ultimately resolving them, and learning the right lessons in the aftermath.